New Hampshire takes lead role in saving endangered butterfly

The hundreds of minuscule eggs in mason jars bundled up in the cold don't look like much now, but in a couple of months they will grow into brilliant blue butterflies once considered extinct in New Hampshire.

The state has taken a lead role in growing the Karner Blue Butterfly, which has been on the federal Endangered Species list since 1992. That year, it also was named New Hampshire's state butterfly as legislators realized its numbers were dwindling.

By 2000, biologists working to assess populations in the state found only one of the butterflies left in the wild. Fledgling efforts to monitor and preserve them led to a series of agreements among the state, city of Concord, and New Hampshire Army National Guard, which provided a building that served as a greenhouse to grow butterfly eggs and wild lupine, the Karner's main source of food.

A decade later, after carefully restoring part of their unique, savannah-like habitat, monitoring their growth in captivity — even enlisting schoolchildren to help grow and plant lupines — state biologists counted last year's population at more than 2,600.

"They're doing a great job," said Cathy Carnes in Green Bay, Wis., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recovery coordinator for the butterfly. "New Hampshire is very good at rearing the Karner Blue Butterfly. ...They've done a wonderful job restoring habitat where they can and creating a partnership to do that."

The butterfly, discovered in the 1940s in the hamlet of Karner, N.Y., by Russian author and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, was once seen in 13 states in the Midwest and Northeast, and in Ontario, Canada. Today, they can be found in seven states: New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The Karner Blue dwells in a unique habitat, with a mix of small trees, grassy areas and sandy soil, much of which has vanished nationwide to development. In New Hampshire, the butterflies roamed in about 4,000 acres of pine barrens along the Merrimack River Valley from Nashua to Canterbury, but their numbers rapidly declined during a period of commercial development in the 1980s.

"They had gone to 1,000, to 500 to 50 in five years," John Kanter, coordinator of the state Fish and Game Department's endangered wildlife program, said of one site monitored in Concord.

State biologists began a plan to restore its habitat — about 300 acres today. The laborious, time-consuming effort involves managing the area through mowing, burning and other practices to make sure it doesn't turn into an overgrown forest. They also came up with a program to bring butterflies and their eggs from the Albany, N.Y., area, where they still had a strong presence, and grow the insects indoors.

"Not only have they restored the New Hampshire population to the wild, but they're generating enough additional Karner Blues every summer to give New York back relatively large numbers" to some areas where the population has lessened, said Michael Amaral, assistant supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Concord. "That's amazing that we're able to go back to the source state and help them out."

Biologist Steve Fuller, recently honored by the Fish and Wildlife Service for his work in New Hampshire, noted in his research that while the results were encouraging, the butterfly population would need to reach thousands more — perhaps closer to 15,000 to 19,000 — to ensure that the species would be able to survive long-term.

In a couple of weeks, wildlife biologist Lindsay Webb, also honored for her work, will bring the wintering eggs into the Concord greenhouse. After hatching, they will exist as caterpillars for about four weeks, feeding on homegrown lupine leaves. After that, they're pupae for about 10 days. They're flying usually around the end of May. The adults then start mating, the females lay eggs and a new group of butterflies can be seen at the start of July.

Webb said the recovery group tries to release as many of each brood into the wild as possible and collects their eggs for the next season. Sometimes, they hold onto a few butterflies for mating in the lab. The average lifespan for a butterfly in the wild is three days. They can live for up to a month in captivity.

She admits the process of maintaining the habitat, monitoring the butterflies' development and growing the lupines is painstaking.

"It's also rewarding at the same time. You get to see it go through its whole life cycle, well, twice in the year," she said. "Once you release them, you see them mating immediately ... then you know what you're doing is working."

The male butterfly's wings are silvery or dark blue. The female is grayish brown to blue, with some orange markings.

Webb recently compiled a handbook for the care and growth of the Karner Blue for use among other states. It contains input from other researchers, such as in Ohio, which also has taken an active role in the butterfly's reintroduction to the wild; and New York and Indiana, which are trying to beef up existing butterfly populations.

The Karner is one of a group of blue butterflies on the federal government's endangered species list that's considered endangered or threatened, but the Karner has one of the widest ranges.

"The decline of blues is prevalent in each area of the country because they all have very similar life history and characteristics," said Heidi Holman, the third New Hampshire biologist honored. "They're often dependent on one particular plant. ... They're an indication of so many other species that maybe aren't brilliant blue that are also disappearing because the ecosystem is declining."

In New Hampshire, other species on the decline that depend on the pine barrens habitat include the Frosted Elfin and Persius Duskywing butterflies.

Rearing butterflies in captivity is still a relatively new development, the biologists say.

"The capacity for them to maintain a solid genetic population is uncertain," Holman said.